Re: ISSUE-65 (excess vocab): REPORTED: excessive duplication of vocabulary

Ian Horrocks wrote:
> I agree that the kind of example put forward by Jeremy 

For the records: I put forward almost the same example independently of
Jeremy. Blame me, not him:-). We both happened to refer to an existing
community: the Dublin Core, more generally the library community.

>                                                         may be considered
> "bad modelling" -- it is surely not intended that a string is the
> creator of anything. What probably is intended is that the creator is
> some object (so dc:creator would be an object property), and that object
> may have a name (typically a string accessed via a datatype property).
> 

Actually... Jeremy indeed referred to dc:creator, I referred to
dc:subject. The latter is a bit different: one can use a subject as a
simple string ("Computer Science") or refer to some sort of a formal
classification system of subjects defined, say, as a SKOS definition, in
which case the object for the dc:subject is a SKOS concept. I can see a
casual user of that property to switch between those two types of objects...

> I don't mean to imply that no "good" example exists, 

I guess that is the important point. We should not go too deeply into
the particulars of DC.

>                                                       or that it is
> reasonable to ignore requirements deriving from what we believe to be
> misuse of the language ;-)
> 

:-)

Ivan

> Ian
> 
> 
> 
> On 27 Nov 2007, at 15:28, ewallace@cme.nist.gov wrote:
> 
>>
>>
>> Ivan Herman wrote:
>>> Well... I did meet one example. DCMI (the organization behind the Dublin
>>> Core metadata) is having problems exactly on that. They have an abstract
>>> model document[1] where they speak about 'value surrogate' that can
>>> either be a literal or non-literal. When mapping this abstract model to
>>> RDF[2] they hit this problem (eg, is the value of a dcterm:subject
>>> property a literal or not).
>>
>> I personally think that this example illustrates plain bad modelling
>> practice. Can you point to some discussion of the motivations for this
>> choice which might modify my view?
>>
>> -Evan
>>
> 

-- 

Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
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